What Lifetime’s Whitney Houston Biopic Left Out from the Singer’s Story

As someone who never watches Lifetime, even I was looking forward to seeing Whitney. Not only is the network notorious for its based-on-a-true-story movies that tend to be the definition of camp, but as a longtime Whitney Houston fan, I couldn’t wait to see how her story would unfold on TV.

I was disappointed, though, once the movie wrapped. Ending on a rendition of her classic, “I Will Always Love You,” the plot made it obvious that everyone involved in the film, including director Angela Bassett, tried too hard to keep things classy. Maybe you should be tasteful when making a biopic about one of the most successful artists of all time, but was I alone in thinking huge portions of her life had been left out?

Bassett has gone on the record to say that the movie would only explore five years of the relationship between Houston and her ex-husband Bobby Brown. When portraying a marriage that eventually lasted more than fourteen years and had many public ups and downs, why did Bassett choose to focus on the beginning of their relationship, hardly the most interesting or telling part in Houston’s story? Not every biopic needs to be overly sensational like House of Versace—although isn’t that kind of the point of a Lifetime movie?—but it seems naive to skim over key aspects of Houston’s life.

Take her lifelong relationship with Robyn Crawford, her best friend since they were teens and, later on, her assistant. After Houston’s death in 2012, Oprah asked her mother, Cissy, if she “believe[d] that Whitney and Robyn were in a gay relationship,” to which Cissy responded: “I don’t really know.” Even ex-husband Brown addressed the gay rumors that followed Houston early on in her career in his memoir, Bobby Brown: The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But . . . , writing: “Now, I realize Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married . . . I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children.” But though their friendship was obviously an important one in her life, the film only briefly addresses it and only mentions once that the two lived together before Houston’s marriage to Brown.

The most glaring omission from Whitney is the huge role that her drug addiction played in her downward spiral. The movie doesn’t exactly shy away from her drug use, and she’s shown consuming cocaine and marijuana at several points. But the film almost implies it was Brown who couldn’t handle his drug use, and that Houston was only a recreational user. It’s been well documented, in interviews and in her train-wreck reality show with her husband, Being Bobby Brown, that Houston’s addiction had a devastating effect on her singular voice and career. Her eventual death was ruled an accidental drowning, due in part to her cocaine abuse.

So why not tell the true story behind the rise and fall of this beautiful, talented singer, who was perhaps one of the greatest of our time? Is it too soon to come to terms with the sad, somber reality of it? Maybe. But if so, perhaps Houston’s story shouldn’t have been told at all.